Earthrise is a peculiar sort of game. In lots of ways it’s an interesting experiment in MMO freedom, with Eve style skills, projectile weapons, and a big PvP-open world. The problems with it, however, are that despite being beautiful, it’s grindy, jittery, and has a low playerbase. Devs Masthead have acted to try and remedy that last bit by removing the monthly fee as of December 1st: “We decided to let all our players unlimited gaming experience until we all are satisfied with the experience in our game. At the moment Earthrise features one of the best visuals, content, and gameplay of all sci-fi MMOs on the market. However it is missing polish and has annoyances that spoil the fun in the game. We are learning from our experience and that is why we will remove monthly charges until we bring the game to a quality state that is satisfactory to us and our players”, said Atanas Atanasov, CEO of Masthead Studios. Earthrise is definitely an oddity, and if you like oddities you will soon be able investigate it for no pennies. I’d say it’s worth a look, because this is one game that just needs to realise its potential.

Aha! I’ve just received word that PC review code for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is leaping towards my post box as we speak (WITtery due on Nov 29th, if all goes to plan), which means we can stop worrying that we’ll be waiting months for Ezio and Desmond to finally creep this way. So, it seems apt to run this AssCreed: The Story So Far videorama, given the time-hopping backstory of this series is fairly convoluted and not a little silly. Oh, I wish they’d lose the sci-fi stuff entirely, but ultro-lore does seem to be the default way franchises build frighteningly passionate fanbases. (more…)

And do you plan to buy it now that it is apparently finished? I wonder if there is anyone out there for whom the “finished” status of the game really makes a difference. “At last!” thinks Mr Hypothetical, “I can finally a get me a release copy of Minecraft.”

Must be his lucky day.

Having completed Saints Row: The Third, I’m the Earth’s most qualified person to tell you all about it. Having already detailed a great many elements of the game in two recent previews, below I take on the task of explaining why such an excessively immature game is in fact quite so very mature. The game is out tomorrow in the Americas, before a team of dedicated THQ staff begin frantically rowing across the vast ocean of the internet to release it in the UK on Friday. Read on to see Wot I think.>

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The chaps at Cadenza Interactive – they of tower defence fancypants, Sol Survivor – have announced they are working on a “six-degrees of freedom” shooter (aka a Descent-alike) called Retrovirus. Apparently it’s all going a bit Tron, because you are sent “into the depths a computer on a search and destroy mission against an invasive virus”. You’ll have a customisable shootercraft, “focusing on strength, speed or cunning, with weapons and utilities to suit a variety of play styles,” and “two-layers of story”. I guess like the two layers of a cake, only narrativer. Sounds intriguing! The game is an early stage of development at the moment, however, so there’s no word on release just yet.

I was only young when I played Ultima VII but I had already ventured to the depths of dungeons that dripped with dread, partaken in interstellar war and defended my home planet from invaders. Like Roy Batty and all people who grew up with games, I had seen and done so much. Between adventures in space, I’d rezone my commercial districts or build a new bus route, leaving room in the schedules for occasional postal service functions. Yes, I had lived a full life already, but I had never watched a man clad in the finest clothes in Britain eat an egg and then belch in the face of a barmaid, so who can say I had experienced anything worthwhile at all?

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Adorable, colourful and surprisingly hefty, Dungeon Defenders action-orientated take on tower defense was like an unexpected rainbow preceded by the light drizzle of a delayed PC incarnation. However, the release of the development kit could be the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow and it’s a pot of gold radiant enough to actually dry any remaining bitterness out of your sodden clothing. Which is one way of saying that providing the ability to dabble with the source code is a fine gift. More details below.

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Oh, Skyrim.> I really am so> enamoured by your peaks, and your misty valleys. Oh, what a beautiful world, filled with possibility and with cheese. Oh, Skyrim, let us bask in the the spook of your ghosts and squirm in the horror of your catacombs. Let us be gleefully smacked about by giants and devoured by dragons. Let us steal hats and trade them for unexpected potions. Oh, Skyrim.> There’s so much to you that there are even ants crawling on this log! Blimey.

And then we bring up the menu. Oh, Skyrim>.

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Just when you thought full price may be an option, here’s another gathering of discounted titles over at Show Me The Games. It’s called Show Me The Sales and includes well-known games such as Frozen Synapse but also some that I’ve never heard of, such as the delightfully titled Magical Diary: Horse Hall. It’s not a bundle, instead offering discounts on single titles and it lasts for almost two weeks. All money goes direct to the developers so if you feel ambivalence or blind rage toward middlemen and charities, these are the discounts for you.

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You may remember, back in March this year, a story that threw EA forum user Arno into the limelight. Having violated the rules of the EA forums he was given a 72 hour ban on his forum account. But found that he was also unable to play online with any of his games attached to his EA gaming account, nor activate his single-player Dragon Age II. This led to quite the brouhaha, which eventually resulted in EA’s announcing that the ban had been “a mistake”, and the promise that not only would Arno’s gaming rights be restored, but they would fix the issue to prevent this happening again. They haven’t.

We are receiving information from a number of gamers who have received forum bans for a variety of reasons who are finding they’re unable to play Battlefield 3 (or indeed any other game tied into the EA user account), and worse, when they try to contact EA for help sorting this out, they are either ignored or told it’s tough. So what’s going on?

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